Well wishing is a dangerous sport
by Shikijika
Summary: Set after 'Michael'. Sebastian goes to visit a doped-up Blaine. It goes about as well as you'd expect.


The painkillers are making Blaine's head soft and cloudy, and he knows his voice is stilted and strange through the strains of speaking through a haze. He is broken all over, he thinks, like he's somehow popped a bolt somewhere in the depths of his spine and he can't muster up the effort to find it again. It's unsettling; okay when Kurt, and Finn and Rachel were here, a blind sort of happiness filtering through his senses with the firm warmth of Kurt's hand in his and the soft sounds of song.

It's not okay now, not okay now because Sebastian is standing in his doorway and he doesn't know _why_.

He really, really doesn't need this right now; Blaine squeezes his good eye shut as though it would make Sebastian disappear along with his already malfunctioning sight. His _fucking_ eye hurts. (Doesn't it?) Go away. I don't want you here.

(I hate you, his mind supplies. But it falls flat.)

Blaine says nothing. To his left, the floorboards where he has spent endless late nights tiptoeing around to go to the bathroom creak, and footsteps follow the sound in a drag across the carpet. Every move Sebastian makes is strange – it's slow, confident in a way that makes Blaine's skin prickle and his chest clench for completely the wrong reasons. Sebastian has no reason – no _right_ to be that way, and yet here he is. Blaine knocks his head back against the headboard, bravely cracking open his left eye to acknowledge Sebastian as some presence unlikely to leave any time soon. Wonderful.

He wishes Kurt hadn't gone home.

"And yet even with the Captain Hook fashion you're sporting, your face is still as pretty as ever," Sebastian says in his usual drawl, his eyes gleaming in the sharp bedroom light. Is he still valid for _To Catch A Predator_? "You _are_ a wonder of the modern age, Blaine Anderson. Even eyepatches look cute as a button on you."

Captain Hook doesn't wear an eyepatch, asshole. "How did you even get here, Sebastian?"

Sebastian pauses in his movements towards the bed, a fleeting frown creasing his forehead before it smooths out again in his usual benign smirk. "Your dad let me up. Says it's nice that your 'old friends' are coming to see you," there's another, verbal pause, Sebastian glancing over at the vintage cameras set up on one of Blaine bookshelves before adding lightly, "Funny, that."

"He doesn't know," Blaine replies, his voice quiet. He fingers the trim of the red check blanket, clenching it in one fist before releasing it again. (It is a wonder his father is home at all. Mom had insisted, because she couldn't very well work from home now could she; someone has to look after him. Like he was going to get up to anything with one-fucking-eye.) When he looks up again, Sebastian is occupying the seat Kurt had left pulled out beside the bed when he'd left. It doesn't look right, Sebastian's languid posture relaxing into the back of the seat like – he belonged there. "And I was kind of wondering more 'how did you know where I live'."

"You're an open book," Sebastian doesn't answer the question, grinning all teeth as he gives that little shudder of a laugh that isn't a laugh at all. Or perhaps it is. It never feels like one, all stiff and coiffed and fake. "It really wasn't that hard. Being captain of the Warblers has its advantages, I suppose you could say."

Blaine huffs, a pale imitation of a disbelieving snort. "The Warblers have a council, not a captain."

"Things change sometimes."

"They shouldn't."

Sebastian hums thoughtfully, and doesn't reply. The silence is welcome, but Blaine still finds himself shifting awkwardly, anything anything anything to break the atmosphere melting into his skin under his pyjamas.

"Your father's quite a character," Sebastian observes after a dragged moment, twirling a pen he's somehow procured between his fingers in an easy, infinite loop. Blaine finds his eye drawn to the movements, his forehead creasing as he watches in half-vision. Quite a character. (It's not the way Blaine would put it.) "I guess I can understand why he let you transfer so many times. Especially to a _public_ school."

"Stop it." He wouldn't usually be so direct, but it doesn't faze Sebastian, whose eyebrows raise but otherwise his expression stays the same. Sebastian puts the pen down on the nightstand, spins it so it skitters across the desk and cracks into the base of the lamp.

"He actually doesn't give a shit, does he?" Clearly, Sebastian has selective hearing issues. But Blaine just sighs and stares at the opposite wall, ignoring the other boy. Beside him, Sebastian adjusts his blazer and leans back with a little sigh of his own. "You should have seen his face when he opened the door. Like I'd just greeted him with 'Hi, Mister Anderson! I'm here to seduce your ailing gay son! Not like that would be hard, ha ha ha' –!" (he speaks the laughter in clipped staccato; annoying) "Does he expect you're getting pity sex from every half-attractive guy who drops by?" Blaine rolls his eyes, unseen. He hears Sebastian laugh, short and sharp by his side. "Hm, I can imagine, you and your private school charm; you wouldn't have much trouble, would you? Do you have torrid affairs with the pizza boy with pretty green eyes and a jaunty angle to his baseball cap–"

"Can you just stop?" And Blaine's bristling, puppy-like snarling almost, his shoulders pulled up box-like as he turns his head to glare at Sebastian. Glare. Or pathetically eyeball with the one cornea that is fully intact. "You know I'm not interested in you. Please. Don't."

Sebastian doesn't apologise – Blaine gets the feeling that's a common occurrence – but he holds his hands up in mock-surrender, his eyebrows raising along with them. Blaine is looking right at him, but Sebastian doesn't meet his gaze any more; he's eyeballing the floor. "Okay, okay, I get it. You're crazy in love with the nymphet from the forest of the fauns, whole Beyoncé dance routine and everything."

"Kurt."

"What?" Sebastian frowns, the smirk suddenly fading from his face and being replaced with something akin to surprise. Maybe it's worry. Blaine doesn't know. It's hard to read faces with one fucking eye. "Jesus, are you hallucinating? He's not here, you know –"

"That's his _name_," Blaine snaps, his head jerking awkwardly forward as he speaks. His eye starts throbbing again; it doesn't hurt, but he can feel it, as though someone is trying to trace the back of his eyelid with a blow-torch. Seal it shut. Burn it burn it burn it. "Use it."

Sebastian snorts and immediately proceeds to ignore his request. "Whatever," he says dismissively, tipping his head towards the prescription on Blaine's nightstand. "It's not like you're going to remember this conversation anyway."

"I've got a good memory," Blaine huffs. But Sebastian just smiles at him in a curve that doesn't meet his eyes; it bypasses them entirely like the gap in a parabola. He stands up and turns away, pulling his arms behind his back and catching his right elbow in his left hand. "Elephantine," Blaine continues, although he's fairly sure that's not a word. The cloud nesting in his brain has its doubts, too. Everything isn't as clear as it should be; even just watching Sebastian leaning curiously over Blaine's chest of drawers, his hand moving to finger the ornaments there, is hard to process. Blaine's head is aching, a dull pang of sensation, and he touches his fingers to his temple. His voice is quiet, strained. "What are you doing?"

"Collecting blackmail material. All the better to sabotage you with. Obviously," there's a measured lightness to Sebastian's voice as usual, but even without seeing his face Blaine hears the twist to it. Picking up one of the model cars, Sebastian gives a soft laugh. (It sounds strange, soft.) "You collect these? Cute."

Blaine snorts. "I'm not."

"You are," Sebastian affirms without skipping a beat, tilting his head to the side as he speaks but keeping his back to Blaine. "Brave little Prince Charming, willing to leap in front of iced drinks for your darling elfin betrothed."

Blaine can see Sebastian's shoulder blades roll under his Dalton blazer, the navy polyester shifting with his muscles as he waits for a response. It never comes; Blaine flexes his fingers against the bedspread, staring at the push and pull of tendons under his skin. (No.)

Sebastian keeps talking, his eyes staring up at the stucco patterns in the ceiling now. He seems awfully restless; it might just be Blaine's strained squinting, but Sebastian is tilting his head and touching things and shifting his feet in harsh drags against the carpet and it is terribly distracting. "You shouldn't have gotten in the way. It wasn't for you."

And Blaine wants to his fist his hands in his hair and say a multitude of things that never cross his tongue. "Do you even know how to apologise to people?" he says instead, wrinkling his nose until he finds that it makes his eye socket pulse harder than before. _Damn_ the eye, damn it fucking fuck shit – but he doesn't have the energy or the control over his limbs to bring out all of that. Instead he's quiet, and subdued and pathetic.

Sebastian stops at Blaine's words and leaves his ornaments alone, his lips peeling apart from each other as he turns around and finds nothing in his throat to speak. He's still not looking at Blaine, his gaze somewhere trailing the pattern of Blaine's blankets. "No. Not really," Sebastian says, his tone dry. The smirk coils back, twists his mouth back into the proper shape, but the little faded look in his eyes is there, timid when they match each other's stares again.

"It's a good skill to have." Blaine was going to punctuate it with a word. What was it? His brain shrugs and pretends to not understand the question. "I don't remember what the word is," he tells Sebastian, even though that is stupid.

So stupid, because Sebastian laughs at him – his head tips back when he does, slow and lazy – and he doesn't even feel angry like he should. There's no twist in his chest, no shaking in his fists like he notices when he boxes; he still feels like a run-down engine. Broken, but not really. Mildly irritated, but not any more than that.

"Painkillers'll do that to you," Sebastian smiles. Smiles. There's no hard edge to the gesture. Blaine frowns at him, furrows his eyebrows deep, because he doesn't understand.

Neither does Sebastian, apparently. His relaxing posture shifts suddenly, tense under Blaine's expression. "What? I'm only saying. I'm not even being offensive."

"Why did you want to hurt Kurt?"

Shrug. "That wasn't really the intended effect."

"But _why_?"

"He took you away from them, so he was an easy target," Sebastian shrugs, toeing the carpet and glancing up at Blaine with a torn expression. It's torn, because it's halfway between his normal expression and a twisted sense of something else. It makes Blaine's heart twinge, for some reason, furrowed under layers of latent irritation. "Didn't really want it to get embedded in anyone's cornea, but. Life is full of surprises."

"That's not – it's – it's the _principle_ of the thing," Blaine gets out, his agitation making his back twinge dully as he presses stick-straight against the headboard and waving his hands in nonsensical gestures. Not that Sebastian is paying attention, having moved away from Blaine's eyeline to the other side of the room. He peers into the lenses of the cameras perched on the high shelf of the bookcase opposite, running the tips of his fingers over the rims, slowly. (Caressing, his mind supplies idly.) "You were aiming for Kurt. What the hell would you have done if I hadn't stepped in front of it?"

Sebastian looks over at him then, mouth twisted, eyes garish-bright in the shine off the cold sunlight outside. Pale green, like weak mint tea. "I don't know, shouted 'success'?"

"It's not a fucking _game_," and the 'a' sound rolls awkwardly off Blaine's tongue and Sebastian quirks an eyebrow at him, but he perseveres. "You could have really hurt him."

"Like how I 'really hurt' –" Sebastian puts single air-quotes around the phrase because he's a douche "– you? You there to take Princess's hits for him, are you?"

"Yes." Blaine frowns and thinks about it. "No." That doesn't sound right, either. Unseen to Blaine (who is making faces at his feet as he ponders), Sebastian is watching him with his head tipped to the side again and a ghost of an amused smile on his lips. "I love him," Blaine finishes, because he can't get the words in his head to come out right but that's what he means all in all, really.

Sebastian falters at that, pauses his bright stream of sparkling conversational wit and his smirking and replaces it with a surprised blink, his narrow eyebrows drawing together, teeth passing over his bottom lip. How odd, Blaine thinks. But he doesn't dwell on it.

"Of course you do," Sebastian says eventually. He doesn't even sound insincere, which is maybe an improvement. "Maybe we should try having this delightful conversation later, when you aren't stating the obvious."

Blaine sighs, shrugs one shoulder and looks towards the window. "Fuck off, then."

"Mm, you're so feisty today. You should be hopped up on pain meds all the time, swearing like an adorable little sailor." Sebastian grins – damn, he's been given ammunition – not moving from the chest of drawers and instead leaning the heels of his palms against the top, bracing his weight on them. The wood squeaks indignantly. "You sound pretty good for being trashed on pills."

Blaine is sorely tempted to blow a raspberry, but he gets the feeling that it would be more than a little bit immature. Also, they make his tongue feel weird, and he really can't take any more of his distracted by simple body movements moments. Body what what what?

"Yeah, okay, whatever," Blaine mutters, more to himself than Sebastian. "Do I have to spell it out for you?"

"What, 'fuck off'?" Sebastian runs his thumb over his lower lip, pouting facetiously. "I think you might have to, sir, my SAT vocab is just _awful_."

"Sebastian." Blaine narrowly avoids cracking his skull off the headboard again, his head deciding to move along with the roll of his eyes. His neck is moving too quickly for his brain. It is extremely annoying.

"Right, right. Duly noted. I'll make a grand exit, creep out your daddy some more," Sebastian winks at him and he's back to himself again, eyes crinkling with the strength of his smirk, fragile and pulling at his cheekbones. He sweeps back across the room in two long strides, turning around at the door.

Blaine just frowns at him. "Please don't. He really doesn't take well to jokes."

"And who says I'd be joking?" his tone is still playful – or rather, playful in Sebastian's own little way, with his dark flourishes punctuating each phrase – and his eyes are bright, but there's a little quirk in the atmosphere that Blaine finds unsettling, a hardness burrowing into the centre of his chest. "I'll text you later, right?"

Blaine doesn't think he needs to reply to this initially, but Sebastian is just standing there with his hand curled around the frame and he's just looking at him, staring with this strange expression that isn't anything like his other faces. How many faces of Sebastian's has Blaine even seen? Mildly predatory is the only one he can think of. He almost prefers it to this one, the unfamiliar crinkles in Sebastian's face that have nothing to do with smiling. "I don't think you should."

Sebastian's lip twitches, and he looks down at the carpet. "Mm," he hums softly. "I'll see you, then."

"Hm."

xxxxx

Blaine is woken up by the gaudy flash of his phone at 8AM after a night spent feeling the dull throb of his eye underneath the lid, and doing anything but sleeping.

_morning, handsome! still schwasted?_

He tosses his phone off the nightstand. The resulting thump only makes his eye throb harder.


End file.
